[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to that makes Total sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice, but that the how sometimes elusa that makes total sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Hey, everybody.
I feel like I always get to say, I just finished this book. This one I didn't finish this morning because I had other homework, so I finished it yesterday, even though I've had it for a while. But I'm sitting here with Jen Rosner, who was a professor of mine at Fuller. So I just want to say thank you. The class was amazing, and she wrote a book that came out about this time last year. So this is like slightly unusual for the podcast, but I will tell you, I can just say it's great a year later. Jen, I'm sure it's as great now as it was when it released, but it's called finding Messiah, a journey into the jewishness of the gospel. So welcome, Jen. Thanks for coming on.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It's so great to be here.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's good to see you. It's kind of funny because I feel like the lectures that I've seen of you, it's a similar box, it's a similar space, but I'm getting to talk back and forth now, which is pretty cool. It feels a little surreal, though.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: It's a little better when it's interactive, isn't it?
[00:01:47] Speaker A: That's right, yeah, it's just, I'm like, oh, it's the same shape. I'm like, did I pull up the wrong lecture?
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Right?
[00:01:53] Speaker A: We're here.
So this is totally to. First of all, I want to ask you, you're in California, is that right?
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Okay, so we're going to get to this other part of Jen's story where she has come back to California after living life in another part of the world. But if I can just say a little bit about your book first, before I let you dive in, I'm just going to let you take over, essentially.
So this book, which has a beautiful cover, actually has something on the COVID that may be unfamiliar to many of the folks who are listening. I would say just because of my background, it is not unfamiliar to me. We have this talite in our closet right now. My husband owns one, but this is probably a little bit unusual for most folks because.
And even the title finding messiah. Like, we know that Jesus, yeshua Christ is the messiah, but we don't even normally refer to him as that. But you are a believer in Yeshua or Jesus, I would say. Jen and I may go back and forth with that.
And you are also jewish, and this isn't, like, something that should be super shocking for us right now, but we're going to go into how this has been like, your identity has been a scandal for centuries. And so I just want to kind of lay that groundwork and say that your identity and the identity of folks who look like you has been a scandal for centuries and centuries, not just inside of the church, but inside the jewish community as well.
Yeah, I don't know, that felt a little like. But anyway, and this is your story, so I'm so grateful that you came on to share it. So maybe if you could just kind of introduce yourself, and then we'll get into.
Yeah, I want to kind of start with, after you introduce yourself, if you could just start with how you found, like, we might say, if we were in a church setting. Tell us your testimony, Jen, of when you found.
Sure.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a winding story, maybe like a lot of people's. And as you said, I currently identify as a messianic jew, which is also a very kind of controversial allegiance to have both in the christian world and in the jewish world, for very good reasons, I might add.
And it's taken me a long time to be comfortable with that label and with that identity. So I was raised in a jewish home in northern California. Both of my parents are jewish. They both grew up in the jewish community in Los Angeles. And then they got married and moved to Lake Tahoe, which is where I, myself and my brother were born and raised.
And we weren't really part of a jewish community. Growing up, there wasn't much to speak of in our town, but I had a pretty strong sense of jewish identity in the home. And we celebrated Passover and hanukah, not all of the jewish holidays, and we weren't very strict about them, but it was something that in some ways, kind of anchored my identity as a child. But it also felt very.
It wasn't something that my friends could relate to because we just didn't have a jewish community. So it was sort of something that was, like, existed in our home, and that was of, I should also say that my mom was raised in the reform jewish community in Los Angeles, and for her, jewish identity was kind of a cultural.
It was very meaningful to her. Like, she was a camp counselor at the jewish camps, and she was very involved in different jewish events. But for her, it wasn't as much theological or religious. It was more sort of cultural. And that was an important identity marker for her. But it wasn't necessarily connected to faith in God or obedience to God or covenant with God. And my dad was a little bit the opposite. He became jaded towards organized religion pretty early.
You know, the La jewish community is very interesting because there are those in Los Angeles who take Judaism very seriously. But then it's also almost like a cultural, almost like a status thing in certain communities in Los Angeles. And my dad just had no patience for that. He thought it was hypocritical. He thought it was shallow. He thought it was superficial. And so my dad was kind of searching for a deeper kind of meaning and purpose and connection. And so he started following these different sort of religious spiritual leaders, some of whom were jewish, some who were not in the 70s. So it was interesting being raised in my home, because for my mom, Judaism was really important, but that was kind of separate from faith in God. And for my dad, faith in God was really important, and it was kind of separate from Judaism for him. So I refer to it as this sort of non contextual monotheism that, of course, had jewish trappings, whether or not he realized it.
So I was raised in this home where we celebrated jewish holidays. I was aware that I was jewish. My dad was very concerned with instilling a jewish identity, I mean, like a faith foundation in my brother and I. And so that's how I was raised. My best friend in high school was Catholic, and I remember going to mass with her, which I guess my parents were fine with. I don't think they were particularly threatened by that.
But I never heard the gospel until I was in college, which is remarkable to me, given that I had a handful of real christian friends in high school. I never knew who the person of Jesus was until I went to. Went to. I did my bachelor's at a large public state school in California called Cal Poly, and I was a political science major. I was planning to go to law school.
And it was just this really interesting set of circumstances whereby all of my friends and roommates were christians at this large public state school. Like, it was just kind of a crazy thing. And yet God was sort of on the move at that time at this particular university. So one example was the campus crusade, which is now called crew. Went from 30 people to 500 people in a five year period. And that's when I was there. So it was like this major sort of like something was going on. And both my brother and I got kind of caught up in that. And so my undergraduate years became a real time of searching. I started eventually going to church on Sundays just because I didn't like being the only kid in my dorm who was there on a Sunday morning. Like, everybody went to church. And I started going to campus crusade meetings and just really sort of wrestling with. And I wouldn't even say that it was like, I don't remember one moment where I heard the gospel for the first time. But I was sort of learning slowly about the New Testament and this person called Jesus.
And I was a political science major, as I mentioned, but all of my electives, I took religion classes because I was just really hungry for this. And again, through an interesting and powerful set of circumstances my last year as an undergrad, it's hard to even describe, but I think I just came to a place where I knew that this was true and I had to figure out what to do with that.
And so I came to faith and sort of knew that this was going to change who I was and what my life was going to look like. And what that meant for me was that I scrapped the plans to go to law school because I was just kind of hooked. Like, I was just hooked on religion and theology and church history and these sort of important discussions that sort of composed this new factor of who I was and how I was understanding myself in the world and God. So I scrapped the law school plan. I went to Yale divinity school to do an MDiv, and I was like a kid in a candy shop. I just loved biblical Greek and biblical Hebrew and all of these classes, systematic theology. I just thought it was the funnest thing in the whole world. And yet internally, I was still really struggling, to be honest, because I did not know how to put the pieces together of this jewish upbringing that I had had and this newfound faith in Messiah that I had. I didn't know how to fit those know. I didn't even know there was such a thing as messianic Judaism. I certainly didn't know any other jewish followers of Jesus at the time. And so I just kind of went into the church world and put my jewish identity on the shelf for a number of years. And I kind of bounced around in terms of denominations. Like, I became a believer in the context of a vineyard church. And to this day, vineyard theology has been very influential in my know, personal theology.
I spent a couple of years during my m. Div. At Yale at an episcopal church. That also became very meaningful for me. And I feel like it's only in retrospect that I look back and realize why I never found a church home, even like a denominational know, because I don't think that the church was my home and won't be my home in the same way that I think it is for many christians, especially gentile christians. So it was the last year of my MDiV, where again, through a certainly God ordained set of circumstances, the jewish piece of my identity began to sort of clamor for attention again. And I realized that I had kind of given up something really fundamental in following Jesus and just sort of going into the.
And then, so I finished my MDiv, came back to California, began my phd at Fuller seminary, and that season really became the season to sort of figure it all out. And my doctoral advisor, Howard Lowen at Fuller, was just an incredible mentor for me. He was the first person who told me, like, jen, it really matters that you're like, in terms of how you do christian theology, your jewishness matters. And I was like, what really? It does. And so my doctoral dissertation, which became published as my first book called healing the Schism, was really just a structured way for me to work out these really deep, really complex questions of identity that I was struggling with of, like, what does it mean to be jewish and to follow Jesus as the messiah? Because as you sort of alluded to, is a tricky thing to do, which is strange, because that's what everybody in the New Testament was doing, basically. But the subsequent history, which hopefully we'll talk a little bit about, has made that very difficult to do. So my doctoral program became really the sort of season of my life, of intentionally sort of parsing through these pieces. During my doctoral program, I was introduced to Mark Kinser, who's probably the world's leading messianic jewish theologian, and became pretty quickly a very significant friend and mentor to me.
I've worked on a lot of projects with him since then.
It was sort of by the end of that time that I, very much to my own surprise, was like, I think I'm a messianic jew. I think that's where I belong. I think this is sort of my people, and it's a messy world. Like, I'll be honest, the messianic jewish movement has a lot that it's kind of figuring out continually.
And so that's sort of the beginning of the story, which much of that comes out in finding Messiah. It doesn't quite lead us up to today, but that's a start anyway, in terms of my coming to faith in Messiah and coming to in sort of always new ways. Figure out what that means as a jew.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Thanks so much for sharing that, Jen.
As you were talking, I just thought, okay, this seems, I mean, I'm almost finished with my MDiv and I'm starting to have these panic moments of like, oh my goodness, this is the most fun thing I get to do. So now what?
Because I relate, I feel like a kid in a candy store.
So I would say that feels very natural to me. But then I'm hearing your story and I'm going, but wait a minute, because I have friends who have stories similar to yours, and for them it didn't look like, oh, sure, this happens. Like, I become a christian, I get baptized, I become a member of a church, I change my entire educational path. And then I'm looking, thinking, okay, but what about this family that you just described, this mom who was raised in this reformed tradition, this dad who really wanted to instill these faith foundations in you, but was not a follower of Jesus as much as you are willing to share.
What did those connections look like during that time?
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Because.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: I want to say this, because I would say my experience has been with my friends who have walked this has been that in the church, at least, like right now, I would say in the church, it's not that it's necessarily a non issue, it's just that it's like something that can't even be seen, really. So if you have a jewish believer who walks into an episcopal church or a lutheran church or a baptist church, that might be like a question. There might be one or two follow ups, but then it's going to be like, come sit down, let's find a spot. Right. I mean, that's kind of in the experience that I've been told, but it's not that way as much with the families and the connections and the religious community, maybe, and I know you said you didn't have much of a religious community in that space, but that kind of have grown up with you. So maybe being welcomed on this side, it feels a little bit easier than like, yeah, but what about Mama?
What did that look like for you? If you're willing to share some of that?
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's such a great question because I didn't touch on that at all. And it's so interesting the way that you describe that, because in some ways the church's welcome has been part of the problem of assimilation for jewish believers in Jesus. Right. And again, there's a lot of different ways that the church has gone historically and currently in terms of Jews in its midst.
But the welcome tends to be sort of like, it has been a sort of snuffing out of jewish identity. Right. Because maybe it's just one little like, oh, you're jewish. That's interesting. It's like, oh, you're korean. That's great. Let's go sit down. I think because, and again, we can talk about the history behind this, but because that hasn't been more of a significant part of church life, this is why jewish believers in Jesus, many of whom still, I recently heard a statistic that's something like, there are 20 times as many jewish believers in Jesus in churches as there are who, like, self identify as messianic jews. And some of them don't see it as anything significant to preserve jewish identity. In fact, there's this kind of, like, I was jewish and now I'm christian, this sort of conversion mentality. So anyway, that's a sort of a different topic. But the way that you describe that is very apt in that in one sense, at least now, not always, the church has been, in some ways, a very hospitable place where jewish followers of Jesus can sort of fit in. But it's also been too hospitable, and that it has sort of forgotten that there might be something significant about jewish followers of Jesus in terms of God's redemptive plan in the world, to put it very grandiosely.
But that's also a great question about my family. So my story, and it's really important to say my story is not. I would say it's not typical in this regard because I also have friends who are jewish followers of Jesus who it just has led to some serious fallout in their families of origin with their jews, say, cottage, when somebody dies, and I have friends whose parents said kaddish over them when they became a follower of Jesus, it's really intense, and I feel so fortunate that that has not been my story.
So kind of interestingly, and I sort of alluded to this earlier, that my brother and I were at the same college, and we both were influenced by this kind of similar crowd, but also just what was kind of in the air of christians everywhere and really passionate christians.
Their faith meant everything to them. And so my brother and I had these similar experiences in college, and so he and I actually became followers of Jesus right around the same time, which was really significant for both of us, I think. And I remember when we sat down at a dinner with my parents and had to tell them that now we believe in Jesus, and at least we sort of have this camaraderie between us, but you never really know how that's going to go. And I think my dad, because he had never had such a strong sense of jewish identity, and I would say to this day, that's not a huge identity marker for him. He was really open to it, and he was really interested in it.
And what he said was, he said, I always knew it was my job to give you a spiritual foundation, and I didn't know how you would build on that. And so there was this kind of interest and curiosity on his part.
And my mom was more alarmed.
I think it triggered in her all of these thoughts of, like, I didn't do a good job, like, raising my kids jewish. Like, what did I do wrong that they've kind of, like, strayed off the path?
So I think she felt a lot of guilt around that and a lot of confusion.
And I think my mom maybe had a bit more negative perception of christians, which is very common for jews who associate things like the Holocaust as a christian phenomenon, which I think for christians is sort of very shocking to hear. But for Jews, that's not. I mean, Hitler had very overtly religious rhetoric, like, twisted, perverted christian rhetoric that was part and parcel of his whole program.
And so I remember that she actually, because we didn't have a jewish community in Lake Tahoe, where I was born and raised, she actually reached out to her rabbi from her childhood in Los Angeles. And I remember, mean, maybe we were on a family trip or something right around this time. And I remember she wanted me. My brother was not there. Like, where was he? In the hard know?
She wanted me to sit down and meet with her. Like, I think she, number one, wanted to see what the rabbi thought about all of this, but number two, was kind of hoping that the rabbi would convince me that this was all, like, a terrible mistake. And so I remember sitting there in the rabbi's office at the synagogue with my New Testament on my lap.
And so that's a little bit how my parents responded. What's interesting is that, again, through a really remarkable set of events, sort of just to cut to the chase here, both of my parents ended up becoming followers of Jesus as well, which is just totally not the typical story for people like myself.
And that's looked different for both of them. I think my mom has been a little bit more frustrated in church settings, which is the only thing that there is. In Lake Tahoe where we live, there's no methy and jewish community. There's no congregations.
I think my mom's found that a little bit more frustrating for a number of reasons. And she feels kind of like a fish out of water, even in just small ways. My mom is a deep thinker. She's an academic, she's an intellectual. She has questions. And so she was like a part of a women's Bible study, and they were kind of like, don't ask so many questions, just like believe. And she was like, no, but some of the New Testament, if you're sitting down, especially as a jew for the first time, it's pretty jarring. I think sometimes christians don't realize how jarring some of the things in the New Testament are.
I want to say it was a Bible study on the gospel of John, of all things, which is really tricky in terms of portrayal of the Jews, et cetera. And they just couldn't be bothered with her questions. They just wanted to get through their little Bible study curriculum, and that was really frustrating for her. Whereas I think my dad, again, who never was tied to Judaism or jewish identity in the same way. He just loves the church that they've been a part of for 20 years now.
And I don't think he sees much missing for the fact that it's just this very lovely evangelical church.
I don't think that's sort of his metric for how to assess his own spirituality, and I don't think it really ever has been. So he's quite happy in the church. My mom's had a harder time. But the point is that we now have this incredible bond in our family that, as I said, is very uncommon.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: I kind of want to latch on to a little bit of your mom's experience for a minute because I think I grew up in the Bible belt, and in some ways, I kind of jokingly, my grandmother passed away a couple of few years ago, and I kind of feel like I'm in a lot of ways following her footsteps of just kind of being like an old church lady. I just feel a little bit like, I'll just bring the casseroles and we'll lead the Bible studies and this is what we do.
But on that, I say, I've been in and led more women's Bible studies than I even want to think about in that kind of setting. And I would say a couple of things. I think the first thing on that is kind of like, I just kind of hate that. That's often the experience in kind of those settings is like, just believe.
But then I would also say that we are just largely illiterate when it comes to the history of, a, the jewish roots of our faith as christians, and b, the anti jewishness that has been present in the church since almost the beginning. I mean, not the beginning, but almost the.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Talk.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: You weave this throughout the book, which is great, but even just now, I'm in a different class, New Testament Bible class right now, and we're reading Paul, right? And it's know, you've got these things where like, well, it's Paul, clearly, and you're know, but this has created a culture, right.
And it's significant that we kind of have these quick answers. We kind of have these short answers. We kind of have these easy answers, and a lot of us have these, and we're like possessors of these answers without actually being aware of where they have come from, because they didn't come out of nowhere. We didn't just know. Your Sunday school teacher didn't just pull these out of the air.
And I'm going to say some stuff that I think if someone is hearing this for the first time, they were like, okay, Alexis, I think you're kind of crazy, but it's like these have been organizationally, systematically, intentionally put in place for centuries before any of us were here, before Christianity had made it to where many of us are listening from right now.
This has been a part of our faith's history. And I say our faith, like in the plural possessive. This has been part of our faith's history, is Christianity's very intentional attempt to sever its ties with its jewish roots, its jewish neighbors, its jewish brothers and sisters, believers or not.
I almost want to say, like, everything but the text. We'll keep the text and just trash everything else. And I don't know, I may have made some people uncomfortable right now, but this is part of your mo as a teacher. And I just want to say that having been a student of yours, I really appreciate it, but I would love it if you could go into some of the background of this and just tell us even.
How far back are we talking? When I say history, we're not talking like, oh, it was the 18 hundreds. How far back are we talking that this sever, and it has a name, like an official theological name. Tell us about that. How far back are we talking that this severing has been attempted?
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's such an important question. I feel like we're sort of dancing around that in this whole conversation so far. And so I think it's really important that we dive in. I do want to say at the outset, and maybe I'll circle back to this at the end, I'm not totally sure what you meant by trash everything else, but I do think that because of this very problematic history, there is a tendency of christians to then want to distance themselves from every single aspect of church history. And personally, I know there's a lot of different perspectives on this, but my belief is that in this complex history, God has actually been faithfully guiding these two communities that are in schism from one another. And so I don't think we can trash it. I think we need to be sufficiently critical of it while still holding on to the Holy Spirit's guidance of and presence within the christian community throughout the century. So I think that's part of the tension. And when I teach on these things, I try to be really careful because I don't want to tear down the entire reality of my christian students, and I don't want them to think, well, now this whole house is burning down. I got to leave. I don't want to create that much of a crisis. What I want to create is an awareness of something that I feel like is not often enough talked about in christian circles. And to answer your question, we're going back pretty far here. I mean, some people would say, and again, I think this is a direct product of history, that people would say, well, it goes back to the, like, you know, Jesus came to do away with Judaism and found something new called Christianity. Or if not Jesus, then certainly Paul. Paul was done with all that Judaism stuff. And, I mean, we do live in a really interesting time where we're seeing remarkable new sort of threads in New Testament scholarship where you have all of these readings of Paul that are, no, no, that's not at all what Paul was doing. And so I think that while we can see seeds of hostility and tension and contention in the New Testament, I mean, obviously there's some tension going on between Jesus and the Jesus believing community and the jewish leaders at the time. Like, we can all just sort of say, yes, there was tension. I think what's different, and I mentioned the gospel of John earlier, is that it's easy for us to look back and say that was like the Jews versus the Christians in the gospel of John, which is actually not at all the case. It was like the Jews versus the Jews. Like it was Jews who believed in Jesus fighting with Jews who were trying to stomp out this Jesus believing movement. And it's very different when it's sort of an intra jewish polemic, as opposed to Christians versus Jews, which is what it would become, but was not yet in the New Testament. So in the early centuries following the New Testament, you have a couple of significant events. I mean, first of all, Paul's mission to the Gentiles is very successful. And so you have pretty quickly kind of, what, a sort of flipping of the reality that we see in the New Testament. In the New Testament, all of Jesus's followers are jewish, pretty much. I mean, it's shocking to people like Peter in the book of acts that this thing is also about gentiles. Like what? Like Peter's vision in acts ten and the subsequent explanations he gives of that vision. He did not see it going that way. Like, he did not think this was going to be about gentiles being included in this covenantal relationship with God through the jewish messiah named Yeshua. So you have this very strong jewish Jesus following community in the New Testament that begins to shift with the mission of Paul. We see this in the book of acts, and we see the way in which this kind of new gentile, Jesus believing contingent is trying to figure out how to live in the midst of this jewish Jesus believing contingent when they. Acts 15 is sort of the classic text on, like, they don't have exactly the same models for what we would call discipleship. Right? Jews are still living as Jews. Gentiles are not called to live as Jews. What does all of that look like in the body of Messiah? These are the central questions of the New Testament. When we get past the New Testament, we see that the gentile contingent continues to grow. And you increasingly have this minority jewish Jesus believing community that's centered in Jerusalem under the leadership of James.
And I think also you have the Roman Empire at this time, and the jewish community more broadly has this series of revolts against the Roman Empire, which makes it increasingly a liability for gentile followers of Jesus to associate themselves with Judaism. So you start to see these seeds of kind of this crumbling of this relationship between jewish believers of Jesus and gentile believers of Jesus.
And then you start to have these sort of institutional realities, for lack of a better word, of what becomes the Gentile Christian church, which is largely institutionalized through the work of Constantine and the agenda of Constantine in the fourth century. Constantine is the first roman emperor who becomes, in some sense, right, I would say, very politically so a Christian. And he begins to christianize the Roman Empire. And with that comes, for the first time ever, the coupling of Christianity and empire. We get the council of Nicaea in 325, which ultimately will yield the Nicene Creed, which becomes the sort of central text in terms of christian orthodoxy ever since.
But notice, it says nothing about the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It says nothing about Jesus being the jewish messiah. And so we should be tipped off by this point that there's something else going on here rather than just the hammering out of christian orthodoxy. And if you read the Church fathers, for example, it's very blatant that now the goal is to completely dissociate this thing called Christianity from this old, tired, heavy yoke called Judaism that is so clear in the writings of the Church Fathers, which gets kind of canonized in the Nicene Creed. And then this just sort of becomes the way that church history goes. And it's important to say, I think you have the jewish community doing the same thing. Right? The jewish community is increasingly defining itself over against the person of Jesus and the reality of christian existence and theology. So you have this kind of mutually exclusive self definition that increasingly takes place between Jews and Christians and the jewish community more broadly and the gentile christian community more broadly. People like Constantine, I think, are really key figures, not in that he created it, but he had the power to institutionalize these things. And it really just sort of grows wider and wider through then. I mean, we can read the church fathers. Augustine is a very interesting figure on these questions, but we could also skip up through the middle ages. We could go to the Protestant Reformation and look at the writings of who, you know, for good reason, is kind of this hero of Protestant Christianity. And he said some very legitimate critiques of the Catholic Church at his time. But he did so by comparing the catholic church of his time to Judaism, of Paul's time. Right. So Martin Luther kind of reads himself into Paul's story, assuming that Paul had this radical break with Judaism. And Martin Luther is sort of having this radical break with Catholicism. And really he bequeaths to us a legacy of how Paul gets read for the next 450 years as the founder of Christianity. Right?
And if we look at some of Luther's other writings, which get more extreme throughout his life, he's really wildly anti semitic, such that at the end of his life, he writes a tract called on the Jews and their lies, which is just horrendous. I have my students read it, or at least read sections of it. And it's like I think for some of my students, they just cannot fathom that this is the same Martin Luther that they've sort of like, that's been this hero to them for their entire. You know, most of my students are Protestants, and we could then draw a straight line. I mean, really? And I think this is very jarring for Christians to hear. We could sort of draw a straight line from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler, who intentionally drew upon the legacy and the thought and the reputation and theology of Martin Luther in very twisted ways. So do I think Hitler was a Christian? Absolutely not. But do I think that he was able to convince Christians in Germany to get on board with what he was doing? Because he was sort of playing on these anti semitic, anti jewish tropes that had sort of been in the water for centuries. So this is the history that I think doesn't get talked about very often. And as you said, I don't think most christians today have any sort of bone to pick with Jews. They might feel sorry for Jews. They might have this sense of like, oh, those poor Jews who think they have to do all these laws and they don't know freedom in Christ. There's probably a lot of different christian attitudes towards Jews, but the very fact that we talk about Christians and Jews as kind of these separate categories, and this is know the subtitle of my book, finding Messiah, is a journey into the jewishness of the gospel. Because one of the things that has always bothered me is the way in which the christian gospel so often gets preached with no mention of the people of Israel or God's covenant with the people of Israel. That just really doesn't have anything to do with the christian gospel that we hear so often day after day in christian churches all over the world. And that is a problem. And it's a direct result of this history that we're talking about. This history has taught christians that your christianity really has nothing to do with Judaism. Like, maybe Jesus was jewish, but it doesn't really matter in terms of how we understand Christianity. Or worse yet, that's kind of what Jesus came to do away with. That's sort of out with the old, in with the new, which is called christian supercessionism, which manifests itself in all of these different ways, which basically says, like, God's covenant with know, to put it very bluntly, has been revoked for whatever reason, they didn't accept Jesus or they weren't faithful, know whatever.
And the church is the new chosen people of God. And even if christians don't quite articulate it that way. It's just in the air that we breathe, and it's in the text of christian theology over the centuries, again, probably beginning in the second century and certainly continuing up until today. So that's sort of a long winded explanation of this really complex history that very much informs the categories that we tend to employ today.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Yeah, but I appreciate that. And I want to name, I want to kind of pull out a couple of things that you said that I think are important for this conversation, for reading your book, for thinking about this.
This is one of those things that I was a student who took your class. And actually, I'm going to say what I want to pull out in a moment, but I debriefed with my husband probably maybe halfway through your class, and I said if I had not had exposure, the sum of the exposure that he and I have had over the last 20 years, if I had not had that exposure already, I would have gone into this class and I would leave and I would say, this lady's mean. You have us read primary texts. You're not nuts. But it's a lot, right? It's drinking from a fire hose.
And it's a lot because of what you mentioned with Luther. And then I'll kind of go back. It's like this hero of the protestant faith, and then we read these things that he's written and you go, wait, I'm sorry, what it doesn't seem to had. I had read Shobaraka wrote a great book, and this image that he gave in the book continues with me. And I'm not saying that this is the same thing as Luther, but he talks about King David, who is honestly a biblical character that I've had kind of a big problem with for a long time. Like a long time. I just have a really love hate relationship with David. And it even took me a long time to admit that know. Anyway, certain conservative religious circles like, you don't like King David. I'm sorry, I don't. I have issues with King David. It's not that I don't like him, but he said, he was talking about it in the terms of humanity. And this author show was saying that we all have gold and shadows in our know. And he said we can read these things that the Bible quotes about King David, that he's a man after God's own heart and all these things that he's the psalmist and he's the king and he's all this. And then he kind of says, but how do you think Uriah's family would have experienced David. Right. Would they have experienced David in this same way? And we have to say, absolutely not. Right. I mean, they saw him as a rapist and a murderer and adulterer and all of these things, and they didn't experience David as this man after God's heart that God names him to.
So I'm not saying Luther is David, but I'm just saying, as you said, there's this tension here. And I think that you stated it here and you stated, again, in our coursework together that we can't say, oh, there was nothing good that came from this because of these horrible things that came from the same setting. And then earlier when you were talking, you said something about that God has basically just kind of sustained these two people groups, right, as we kind of walk these paths together, or not together, really largely, but these two people groups. And I just want to. In the book and in this conversation, I think the tension is what we need to name.
There's not really a point that we can come in this conversation that feels very clean to me. Right. I mean, we've got these two people groups who really, we can look back and we say, well, if I had to do it over again, like, they shouldn't have been separated. Right. But they are. Right. So then what do you do with this tension? Right? Then you've got things like, Luther, what do you do with this tension? Then you have this hospitality that we named earlier that's like welcoming of jewish believers and kind of snuffing out, to use your words, at the same, like, that's attention. Like, we've got all of these places, like, everywhere we turn, there's not a lot of. Just kind of clean.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: We can look at this and say.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the thing, right? It's like all of this is filled with. All of these points are filled with tension. And, gosh, that can be really hard. It can be really uncomfortable. It can be tiring. I mean, goodness. I think it can be tiring. We know when you mentioned that quote earlier about jewish folks who believe in Jesus, most of them are in the church, like, by and large. I'm like, yeah. And who can blame them in a sense, maybe. I'm not saying this is the way, but I'm like, in some ways, it probably is easier just to be in this kind of setting and not have to. This tension isn't quite as front and center in your everyday life, because this is really dealing with tension. It just requires a lot.
[00:43:04] Speaker B: No, it does. And I would say that you're honing in on something really key here. And I think if I were to have a life motto, it would be embracing the tensions. And it's interesting because finding Messiah is sort of like half memoir and half kind of biblical, historical, theological reflection. And I really think that in my life and in my journey, those two are very closely connected. And I think, for me, the way that I have not been able to avoid tension in my own self definition, self understanding, my identity as this jewish believer of Jesus, which maybe for some makes more sense now, why that would be so difficult than it did 15 minutes ago.
Because of us kind of unpacking this history here. I just have learned. And there's been this really significant quote, and I don't have it in front of me, but it's in the book somewhere by this jewish feminist woman named Blue Greenberg, who said, I don't see the tension as a sign of my unhealth. I see it as a sign of the richness of my life. And that quote has been really central for me over the years. I probably just botched it. But this idea that it doesn't mean there's something wrong, that there are these tensions. Right? And I think this is where it's interesting that christian theology, and we see this going back to the creeds, right. Christian theology, because of this kind of greek influence. Like, we want things to be parsed out in these really neat, clear cut, black and white, identifiable categories. And that's exactly what the creeds are trying to do. And I'm not knocking the creeds. I think the creeds are really important, actually.
But that's what christian doctrine has done. That's what it's all about. We want to hammer down exactly Jesus's nature as both human and divine. We have to get the right words, and we have to use the right metaphors, and we have to use the right concepts. And jewish thought and theology over the years is much more comfortable with tension, with even kind of, like, seeming contradictions. And so if you read rabbinic texts, like the Talmud, for example, you get these extended arguments between different rabbis that oftentimes are never resolved. They just kind of move on. They get into this argument, and this rabi sees it this way. And so you have these different schools, right? So even in the New Testament, we have this sort of school of Shemai and the school of Hillel. And you do have the same thing in Christianity, where you have different streams of Christianity and different denominations of Christianity. But in Judaism, there's a much stronger sense of what's called am Israel. Like, we are all part of the people of Israel, and we have these squabbles. And this, again, this is the lens that I think we need to read the Gospel of John through. For example, there's this very strong sense of peoplehood and unity within that.
That is the container for debate and disagreement that is the lifeblood of Judaism. And this is where job is, like, such a classically jewish figure. And I think for some Christians, going back to my mom's experience, for example, it's so tenuous to be a question asker and a wrestler in certain christian circles. And in Judaism, that's just how we roll. We argue, we debate with each other, with God. The very word Israel, wrestling with God is at the very core of what it means to be jewish. And so I think there's a lot more comfort with the discomfort and with the tension. And I think if you read, like, post Holocaust jewish thinkers, it's just unbelievable, the kind of crisis, obviously, that the Holocaust causes for the jewish world. And I would argue the world all over.
But the way that jewish thinkers wrestle with faith in God after the Holocaust is so moving to me, someone like Ellie Weasel, for example, because this is the history of the, you know, this has always been the history of the jewish people. And so tension is like nothing new, whereas I think christians are so threatened by things not being nailed down. And your doctrine is different than my doctrine and orthodoxy and these concepts that make it really difficult to acknowledge that Martin Luther was a revolutionary in a great way, and he was, like, this total blind sinner, and so was King David. And so I think there's more of a comfort in Judaism with being able to kind of press into both sides of that. And so that's what I was saying earlier. I really want my students to walk away not thinking that, and now I will never respect Luther again. I don't think that's actually the conclusion that we need to draw. I think we need to look at.
Yes. Human, absolutely. But also, what were the influences of Luther like? Why was he so vehemently and violently opposed to the. And so I think if we go back and we sort of get curious about Martin Luther's anti Judaism and anti Semitism, there's a lot to be unpacked there. And so my goal is for christians to be aware of this history and aware of the way in which it has forever impacted the relationship between Christians and Jews. And for people like myself, what it means to sort of be standing in the middle of these two kind of like feuding communities. I think what I'm going for is awareness, not divorcing oneself from that history as a Christian. And so I go to great lengths, or at least I try to, and I hope it succeeds, to encourage Christians like, no, the christian church is a beautiful thing, and for no other reason than the fact that the christian church is the only place where the gospel of Jesus Christ has been proclaimed and preserved for centuries. Nowhere else. Nowhere else. I mean, if we ditch the christian church, we're kind of lost, really.
And this is attention, right? Even in the midst of its apostasy. In some ways, I would call it that. With regard to the jewish people, the christian church has preserved the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I might argue that it's a slightly distorted gospel because it's been divorced from God's covenant with the people of Israel. But that core of truth has always been preserved, and I can only attribute that to the Holy Spirit, like being present in this tradition. And this is why I think it's such a remarkable time that we're living in now, where we're beginning to see kind of this reassessment of Judaism from a christian perspective and of Christianity from a jewish perspective. We see the birth of the messianic jewish movement in the last 50, 60 years. I mean, I think this is all remarkable things. And so again, I hope it's coming clear that I don't think we need to trash christian history. I think we need to be honest about it.
[00:49:52] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
I wasn't going to go back to this, and I wasn't clear earlier when I said, keep the text and trash everything else. I was meaning. I think that often christians have done something similar with Judaism, right. We're going to keep your text, we'll keep the hebrew scriptures, we'll keep the Old Testament, but just kind of trash everything else, like traditions and whatever. Who cares? But we'll keep that, right? Because even the early would be fathers who wanted to trash the text, no one was interested in that, right?
They didn't get very far. So it's like, we want the Old Testament, as we call it. We want the scriptures, we want the synops, but then it's like everything else, we'll kind of, like, we'll trash it, we'll forget it, whatever. That stuff isn't really important. Just give us your words, right? Give us your sacred text and we'll keep that because there's something about it, right. That must be important. I don't know what it is.
[00:50:50] Speaker B: And then we'll keep that.
[00:50:54] Speaker A: That's what I meant when I said trace the other stuff. But yes, but I think with the history, I think we're just not aware of it.
Most of people I know, my husband is the exception of people that I actually know in real life who will just sit down and read a church history book for fun. I don't know anyone. I was not that person. And so even in your class, I had awareness of a lot of the stuff that we talked about. But the primary texts I read for you, I had not read those prior because it just didn't really interest me. But I want to go to Jesus for a moment and kind of on this tension that you were talking about. This, this, we're one people and the jewish people tend to culturally just be more comfortable with the tension because it hit me for a moment and I don't normally like on the podcast, like I don't know if we can kind of change the way someone might read the Bible that does not really think about. But at the same time, let's go back to your mom's Bible study in John. Let's go back to Jesus. Because one of the things that I have become aware of really, since I've been in seminaries, been the most explicitly stated is what you alluded to earlier, that these were in house debates with Jesus and his followers and then jewish folks who were kind of not interested in this Jesus movement continuing because it was really disruptive to the culture and to the community.
And I'm wondering if you can. I'm thinking of folks that have edited stuff like Amy Gillovene. I'm thinking of Paula Frederickson. I'm thinking of some of these people who have really kind of dived into this and talked a lot about how we might read those places where we see these, what we have been taught. I would say I grew up in the Bible belt, right? So what culturally we have been taught it was Jesus versus, quote, the Jews, right?
And I'm going to say it like the Pharisees are bad guys, right? I mean, it's like every time that's even like a kitschy thing to say or whatever, don't be a know kind of thing. And it's like all of this is because. Because this is the rift, right? These are the things that we've been taught all of this. But if we could shift the way we actually read the biblical text and just had a few things in mind in this setting, it really makes a difference. And I think how we see Jesus, how we see the jewish people, how we see the setting, how we see tension, how we might welcome.
So there's not like a super specific question there. But what would you speak to that if someone came and someone like your mom and is like, I don't get this, maybe they're not jewish, right? There's a gentile believer, and they're like, I don't get this. It seems know, the Jews, the Jews, the Jews, especially in John's gospel, is really hard to read. I mean, yeah. If you had some time with them, what might you say to kind of encourage them in what might have really been going on in that setting that might encourage them to read it a little bit differently?
[00:54:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really important question. And this is what I mentioned earlier, that I think we're living in remarkable times in so many ways. But one of them, and I sort of said, you have these new paradigms for how to read and understand the New Testament. And one of the things that I think is the most remarkable is that we have this entire school of Jewish New Testament scholars. Like, that just wasn't a thing for a long time.
[00:54:30] Speaker A: And they're fascinating too, right?
[00:54:32] Speaker B: Yes, it's incredible. I mean, it's incredible because you've basically had gentile Christians reading the New Testament for 1800 years with maybe like a jew here or there who maybe have some interesting ideas. And then you start to see like this sort of, anyway, the history of the messianic jewish movement is very interesting in that regard as well, and the sort of the predecessors of contemporary messianic Jews. But what we are seeing in our day is scholars like you mentioned, Paula Fredrickson, Amy Jo Levine, Mark Nanos, these jewish scholars who do not believe in Jesus, by the way, many of them that I'm talking about right now who are kind of like teaching christians how to read the bible. And for someone like Amy Jolevine, actually also Paula Frederickson, they're also teaching christians about the problematic ways in which the text has tended to be understood.
And Amy Jolevine is just like a know. There's a lot of ways you can listen to her speak as well, but her books are just so piercing in terms of kind of naming some of this history, naming the biblical hermeneutics that have informed christian thought over the centuries. And so I just feel so fortunate that we have these Testament scholars who are really breaking a mold of what was sort of never done and not really okay to mean, you know, Amy Jolene tells a story about how she decided to get a PhD in New Testament in her very jewish family. And one of her relatives said, why would you want to read that horrible, anti semitic, terrible book? And she said, well, have you ever read it? And the relative said, no, why would I read such a horrible, terrible anti semitic book? So you're getting a little window into jewish perceptions of Christianity, right?
And so Amy Gilloven is just sort of, like, blowing these categories wide open. And yet I think what's interesting and for some problematic is that not for everybody, but people will say, well, she doesn't believe in. So, like, how can I learn about Jesus from this jewish scholar who doesn't believe in Jesus? And I would say we take truth wherever it comes from. Right? First of all. But I also think this is where the work of messianic Jewish New Testament scholars, I think, is also very significant, because here you have followers of Jesus. And I am not a biblical scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but people like Mark Kinser, David Rudolph, there's kind of this growing group of messianic jewish New Testament scholars who have remarkable things to say as followers of Jesus, who are also reading the New Testament from this jewish lens. So I mean, all of that to say, I think there's just so much out there now in our day.
Resources. I mean, David Rudolph, who's a very good friend and colleague of mine, New Testament professor, messianic Jew, he's editing a series, a New Testament commentary series, that is, like, I forget exactly what the title is called, but it's like reading the New Testament after supercessionism. So supersessionism, as we said, is this whole sort of history of problematic christian theology towards the jewish people and God's covenant with Israel. And so they will have a commentary on every book of the New Testament. From this perspective of after supercessionism, how do we understand these texts? If we're doing away with this problematic Christian versus Jews, law versus grace, out with the old, in with the new, then how do we understand Paul? And there's so much out there, it's almost overwhelming, to be honest. It's almost hard to keep up because there are so many new, just incredible books. And it's not just Jews or messianic Jews. I mean, I think of people like Matt Teeson, Matthew Teesson, who's a christian New Testament scholar who just has just done amazing work on helping us to understand the text better. So he's just now coming out with a book on Paul, but he also wrote a book called Jesus and the forces of Death, which is on issues of ritual impurity in the Gospels. And I literally read his book and then had to add a chapter in finding Messiah to talk about ritual purity because I think it's such a central lens through which to read the Gospels that for the history of know textual interpretation just didn't have much to say about that and didn't think that was a real significant category. And Matthew Teeson's work has just completely reoriented my reading of the Gospels in this regard. Understanding that Jesus is, and this comes back to this sort of intra jewish debate, Jesus is not ditching Judaism, far from it. Jesus is operating within Judaism at the same time as doing something radically new, which, by the way, was foretold in the prophets and all throughout the Tanakh or the Old Testament. But understand this category of ritual purity has given me an entire new lens to see what the life and work and mission of Jesus was all about. So all of that to say, there's so much out there that we're so fortunate, right? We're so fortunate to have this whole growing library of resources to help us come to the text with new eyes in light of this whole history and our own day that we're talking about.
[00:59:40] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's been, it has been quite incredible and quite helpful.
And Amy Gillivine is a complete fireball, as you would like. I would kind of point like, not that she's definitely an academic, right. But folks who are probably not going to dig into a 400 page book by Paula might watch a YouTube video from Amy or something.
Because I would say, I've shared this story a couple of times I haven't shared in a really long time. But what I want to comment, because I have felt, again, the tension of, especially more in the past, I would say before my seminary career started, I felt a little bit more of that tension that you named of, like, well, how can we learn from these guys? Because they don't believe in Jesus. And what about inspiration or what about holy spirit or these kind of things? And you just kind of feel know, oh, I don't.
We, my husband and I have been to like a lot of times. And on his first trip, he went the year before I went, he went with a different group of friends and he came back and we were young adults, college grad school age, and he was sharing about his experience. And he said in this testimony time at our little campus ministry, he said, it's like whenever you are dating someone or even just, you're a good friend and you go home with them for the weekend, or for thanksgiving or something like that. And you feel like you know that person better, like at a different level because you've met their family and you see this kind of context and all this. And he know that going to Israel, he felt that way, but it wasn't a land issue for him as much as it was a people issue. And he went and he came back and he said, I met Jesus family. Right.
I met his family when I was there. And I kind of feel a little bit that way with these scholars. Right.
These folks are family to a degree, right. And we can learn from Jesus family in this, right. Reading this through a, you know, looking at this and you're really, it's remarkable, but it's really cool, right. That we have these people to help us to learn and they're doing this in obviously a very wonderful, scholarly, learned academic, all of the things. But the fact that they are jewish is something that is an asset. Right.
In this setting. And so I just kind of want to name that for myself, that as I continue to read more and have more exposure. I'm really grateful. I sit in the tension still a little, but I'm really grateful for it as well.
[01:02:52] Speaker B: That's such an interesting way. I love that. I love that way of kind of framing of, like, this is Jesus's people, this is his family. Like, sure, we have something to learn from them, even though that does not erase the tension. Like, I'm never in favor of erasing the tensions. We need to embrace the tensions, but I think that's a really important kind of perspective to name.
[01:03:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
As we wrap up, really, I just want to ask you, like, I just want to say, I told you I had less notes on this one than normal just because I had spent some time with you. And then I love memoirs, and so I thought I could go lots of places, but even with less notes, we only hit about half of what I had. So rather than me steering this anywhere in our last couple of minutes, I just want to ask you, how would you like to wrap us up? Is there something that you would say in these conversations? This thing tends to come up or this is really important. Are you feeling like for this conversation in particular, you'd like to leave us with something?
With something that you feel like is meaningful or special to this conversation? I just want to give you opportunity to say what you want to say in the context of this conversation because it is a big one.
And I'll put a link to your book and everything that we've mentioned here so that folks can go and dig around on their own, but as we close out our time, kind of. What last words would you leave us with?
[01:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for that.
I have, like 17 things that I want to say, but I actually want to come back to the comment that you made, and then maybe I understood in one way and you clarified it another way by saying, sort of take the text and trash everything else. For some reason that is really sticking with me, both in the way that you intended it and in the way that I actually sort of misunderstood it. I think, and I think there's something there because I think in one hand, if I'm understanding you correctly, this time around, you're saying that's what Christians and christian history has done. We've taken the text of the jewish people in the form of Tanak or the Old Testament, and we've sort of trashed everything else. We don't care about how you've interpreted these texts. We don't care about what these texts have meant to you. We don't care about how you think about or organize these texts. We're just going to sort of take them and we're going to do our christian thing with them. And I think that's very problematic. I think that that is, in a nutshell, that's christian supercessionism right there. And to some extent, it sort of veers off into all these different directions of appropriationism. Right. Like we're going to take your jewish holiday and we're going to sort of make it into this other thing, which has been very offensive to the jewish people over the years. Like Christians, you just do your thing and just, like, leave us alone. Basically.
I think if I'm understanding you right, this time around, I think that's what you're saying. And I think that has very much happened. But I also think that it's interesting to me, the way that I took your comment, which is that what we need to do with regard to christian history is keep the text, I. E. The Bible, and trash the rest of christian history. And so it's interesting to me that that's how I heard you, because I've seen people say that that's the solution, right. And I think because we sort of alluded to the messianic jewish movement as this very complex sociological space for lots of reasons. But one of the things that you see in the messianic jewish movement is Christians, non Jews, Gentile Christians, who have basically come to the conclusion that christian history has been aberrant, that it's been off course, that it's been an apostasy and that therefore, what we need to do is scrap all that. We can't trust the church fathers. We can't trust the creeds. We can't trust this sort of christianizing of pagan holidays like Easter and Christmas. We need to be done with that. And it becomes this very interesting draw for christians to move toward messianic Judaism, which is this whole other thing that we have exactly no time to unpack. But I just think that's really interesting how you meant that comment, which I think is a very legitimate problem, and how I heard that comment, which is another problem, isn't it? And so I think maybe where it would make sense to end is just to say, to sort of explicitly name the different ways in which these kinds of issues land for christians because they're difficult issues. Like you said about my class, if you were hearing all of this for the first time, it's like a cris. It can be very unsettling and sort of derailing in terms of christian self understanding and identity. And that's where I try.
My goal is not to make people lose their faith, certainly not in Jesus, but also in, again, just like God's sustaining, providing guidance of these two traditions. I think that's maybe like the overarching tension for me is like the jewish people for centuries have rejected Jesus by and large, and we could draw all kinds of probably unwarranted theological conclusions about that. And the christian church for centuries has divorced itself from the jewish people and seeing any significance in God's covenant with the people of Israel. And so what do we do with that? And I think that's a very tricky question and sort of for like a teaser, this is actually exactly what I hope to unpack in my next book is like, what? Because I've had christians who say, students and readers of mine and otherwise, who kind of come to that conclusion like, she's crazy, she's off her rocker. None of this is true. I'm going back to how I thought before I ever took this crazy class from Jen Rosner. But I've also had christians who've said, if we buy into this, if we agree with everything that you're like now, what does that mean? Do we start celebrating Saturday Sabbath? Do we start having Passover seders? Do we distance ourselves from christian practices or holidays with questionable origins? What do we do now? And so I think I just want to sort of honor that question because I understand that these issues can be unsettling for christians. And I want to sort of honor the complexity of what it actually means for christians to come to terms and to just sort of sit with and wrestle with these very difficult issues that are strewn throughout christian history, christian theology, the christian church today. And so I think I would encourage listeners, for christian listeners don't think that the answer to what to do with these tensions is immediately obvious, because I don't think that it is. I think that there's so much depth and complexity in what it means for christians to come to terms with all of this. And so it might not mean what you think it for certain christian listeners or for certain christians who are encountering the thought of Amy J. Levine or Mark Kinser or, like, proceed with care and intentionality and patience with what it means in this historical moment that we're in for us to be grappling with all of these questions.
[01:10:15] Speaker A: Wow, that's so good.
It is.
Just on a little side note, my husband and I happened to have exposure to some of these things 20 years ago, and I can say 20 years later we're still grappling with those questions.
And I don't know that that will end.
We might be smarter than we were 20 years ago, maybe in some spaces, but I don't see that ending.
I don't know. I just kind of want to thank you for that comment because I feel like there were parts of these last 20 years that would have looked different for me had I had someone really significant in my life say what you just said.
And so I just want to affirm that that feels really valuable to me.
[01:11:10] Speaker B: Good. I hope so. I think it's too easy to draw conclusions when we encounter things, and I think sometimes we shouldn't right away.
[01:11:19] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's super great. And again, I think about, like gentile Christians can take a cue from our jewish brothers and sisters and say, attention isn't a bad thing.
We can take that. It's amazing.
Again, the book, which I've got a list of other links that I'll put in the show notes as well, but this one will be at the top. This is Jen Rosner's book finding Messiah, a journey into the jewishness of the gospel. I'm just so incredibly grateful that you came on. Thank you so much.
[01:11:55] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. What a rich conversation.
[01:11:59] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show notes, music and podcast production by Seth Busetti. Be sure to give us a review on iTunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit
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